December 2018 Summaries

Game Off recently concluded with over 300 game submissions, marking its largest event ever, centered around the challenging and enjoyable theme of "HYBRID." The overall winner, Singularity, invites players to control a robot navigating a dystopian world, while other notable winners include MIX UP for best gameplay, Fire of Kala for best graphics, Home for best audio, Lens for innovation, and Blow the Shark Down for theme interpretation. The event showcased a diverse range of games, from the tactical Doom-inspired D-Tac to the nostalgic gallery shooter GRIMCURSE, demonstrating a blend of creativity and technical prowess by developers who utilized platforms like itch.io for exposure. Game Off encourages sharing experiences on social media with #GitHubGameOff and looks forward to the next iteration in 2019, continuing its tradition of fostering indie game development and community engagement.

Release Radar highlights various innovative projects and tools that gained significant updates in November, showcasing both major technological advancements and intriguing side projects. Notable releases include eDEX-UI 1.0, which offers a terminal with a cinematic interface, and HTTPie 1.0, a command-line tool enhancing web server interaction with new features such as JSON formatting and persistent sessions. Other projects like HTTP Prompt 1.0 and SVGR 4.0 bring enhancements to API exploration and SVG conversion to React components, respectively. SVG-edit 4.0 and Buku 4.0 have also reached important milestones, with SVG-edit migrating APIs to Promises, and Buku enhancing bookmark management. Pelican 4.0, a static site generator, introduces new capabilities for content creators, while Filament 1.0 and Alda 1.0 make strides in rendering and music programming. Kaku 2.0 offers improved music streaming from popular platforms, and CMS.js 2.0 transforms Markdown content into web applications with new features like tagging and search. These projects reflect the dynamic nature of open-source software development and the diverse interests of the community.

In 2018, GitHub introduced a variety of features and improvements aimed at enhancing collaboration, security, and learning within its developer community. Notable updates included tools for better collaboration, such as suggested changes in pull requests, and enhanced security measures like vulnerability alerts for multiple programming languages. The platform also launched GitHub Actions to streamline workflow customization and improved integrations with services like JIRA and Slack. GitHub Enterprise received significant updates with the introduction of GitHub Connect, which aimed to unify the developer experience. Additionally, GitHub Education expanded its offerings to provide more resources for students and educators, including the Classroom Assistant and an enhanced Student Developer Pack. The year concluded with a commitment to continue supporting developers across various platforms and technologies.

GitHub emphasizes user trust by providing an easy process for accessing personal data connected to user profiles, allowing individuals to make informed decisions about their usage of the platform. Users can request an archive of their data through their account settings, which includes comprehensive information such as profile data, associated email addresses, and details of repository interactions like issues, pull requests, and comments. The data is provided in a machine-readable format, enabling users to back up their data offline or transfer it to another service. Archives are accessible for seven days or until deletion by the user. For additional control or organizational data exports, GitHub suggests using the Migration API.

Since its launch over six months ago, GitHub for Unity has focused on improving its extension and fixing bugs to enhance user experience, with a particular emphasis on supporting GitHub Enterprise. After receiving multiple requests, the team quickly responded by releasing a beta version for Enterprise customers, leading to the official support in version 1.2.0, thereby broadening its accessibility to more developers. As a small team, they are contemplating their future impact and priorities for GitHub for Unity in 2019 and are open to feedback and collaboration from the community. They encourage interested individuals to connect via the project repository or Twitter to contribute or learn more about the development of the GitHub for Unity extension.

GitHub has announced achieving significant security compliance milestones by obtaining AICPA Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type 1 and SOC 1 Type 1 compliance for its Business Cloud, along with ISAE 3000 and ISAE 3402 for international customers. These achievements reflect GitHub's commitment to maintaining high security standards and providing assurance to its customers that their data is secure. SOC reports, widely regarded as the gold standard for security compliance in the US, require strict adherence to information security policies, and GitHub's compliance affirms its dedication to protecting customer data. The company also plans to issue SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type 2 reports biannually to further enhance its security framework. GitHub's security measures encompass various operational practices, such as access management, data protection, and incident response, demonstrating the effectiveness of its controls.

GitHub for Visual Studio has enhanced its pull request experience by introducing check runs and annotations, offering reviewers more detailed insights into code changes. This feature allows the integration of GitHub applications that generate annotations, providing feedback such as errors, warnings, and information directly inline with the code, using specific color codes for easy identification. Reviewers can click on annotations for more details, and these integrations can be customized to address various file types and coding standards. Applications like Build Cross Check, Yamburger, Kubevalidator, Prosebot, and Linter-Alex demonstrate the flexibility of the system by offering targeted checks for different programming and documentation needs. The new functionality aims to improve the thoroughness and sensitivity of code reviews, inviting users to test the feature and provide feedback through GitHub's communication channels.

In 2018, GitHub experienced significant growth, with more new users joining than in its first six years combined and over 100 million repositories hosted, largely due to the thriving open source community. The final Octoverse report of the year highlighted the most active new open source projects, based on the number of stars and contributors they received in their initial 28 days of being public. These projects ranged from coding tutorials and algorithm examples to professional tools and entertainment, demonstrating a wide array of interests and skill levels within the community. Notable projects included those aiding in learning to code, such as trekhleb/javascript-algorithms, as well as professional tools like denoland/deno and ValveSoftware/Proton. The year also saw a rise in projects related to JavaScript, machine learning, and Windows app development. Overall, the report celebrates the diverse contributions and innovation within the open source community, emphasizing a welcoming environment for both new and experienced developers.

GitHub has launched a new Status Page to enhance communication transparency and reliability for its users by detailing the status of individual components across its distributed services platform, which is spread over multiple global data centers. This new page allows users to subscribe to updates via email, SMS, or webhook delivery, thus improving communication during incidents by providing granular status updates and enabling users to follow the lifecycle of an incident from investigation to remediation. The initiative is part of GitHub's commitment to treating reliability and performance as core product features, making them priorities alongside new functionalities. As part of this transition, the old status site will be phased out by the end of February, with planned brownouts helping users identify dependencies on the deprecated site, and a scheduled test on December 18, 2018, to trial the new incident response workflow. GitHub aims to foster trust within its community by prioritizing reliability, involving not just engineers but the entire organization, including product managers and designers.

GitHub has introduced the Content Attachments API, now in beta, which allows content behind URLs shared in comments on issues and pull requests to be embedded directly into conversations, minimizing context-switching and enhancing focus. This API integrates with a range of GitHub Apps designed to improve communication and productivity by embedding visual and interactive content within GitHub discussions. Notable apps utilizing this API include RunKit, which facilitates reproducible bug reports for Node.js projects; LeanBoard, which offers a collaborative digital whiteboard experience; CloudApp, which enhances visual communication through video and image sharing; and Lucidchart, which provides dynamic diagrams that update with system changes. These integrations aim to streamline workflows and enhance the clarity of communication for development teams, keeping the focus on efficient and effective code delivery.

GitHub Learning Lab for organizations has been introduced to facilitate onboarding and knowledge sharing among developers, regardless of team size, by providing a platform for skill development directly within GitHub. This initiative aims to streamline the process of building skills through hands-on projects, tailored to specific workflows, and has already seen tens of thousands of developers completing projects at their own pace. Responding to feedback from users who required internal learning environments, GitHub has now made Learning Lab available to its Enterprise customers, allowing learning experiences to occur behind corporate firewalls. This expansion enables teams to onboard, train, and innovate more efficiently, potentially transforming how developers learn and share knowledge on a larger scale.

The 2018 State of the Octoverse report explores the use of emoji reactions among GitHub users, highlighting how developers express approval, celebration, and consensus through symbols like 👍 and 🎉 across public and open source repositories from October 2017 to September 2018. The analysis reveals that different programming language communities and geographical regions have unique patterns in emoji usage, with Ruby projects receiving the most ❤️s and C# users expressing more 😕s. Notably, Japan and the Czech Republic stand out for spreading positivity with high usage of 😄 and 🎉 respectively. The report also notes that emoji reactions often accompany public comments on diverse topics, from code management to expressing gratitude and support, and are frequently used in tactical scenarios such as code reviews. The GitHub community's interaction through emoji is seen as a playful and effective way to communicate emotions, transcending language and cultural barriers, and the report encourages readers to explore further data insights on GitHub's blog.

San Francisco Unified School District's integration of computer science into its curriculum in 2015 led to a collaboration with Code Nation, a non-profit focused on career readiness in the Bay Area and New York City, which connects high school classrooms to industry mentors. These mentors, who are professional software developers volunteering their time, provide students with a high-quality curriculum that includes hands-on projects and paid internships, enhancing students' skills and preparing them for STEM careers. Code Nation's curriculum, central to which is the use of web technologies and GitHub, is continually refined by a group of core contributors, including volunteers from tech companies like Google and the Flatiron School. This initiative has resulted in significant outcomes, with 74% of Code Nation alumni working in STEM fields and 63% in computer science. The GitHub Education program supports this effort by providing schools with access to real-world tools and workflows for free, empowering the next generation of developers with practical skills and experiences.

Jeremy Howard, Co-Founder of Fast.AI, is set to speak at GitHub's headquarters in San Francisco on December 11, where he will explore the impact of deep learning on Software Intelligence in a conversation with Sam Lambert, GitHub’s Head of Platform. Howard, known for his globally accessible massive open online course (MOOC) and as the lead developer of the fastai library, will contribute insights particularly relevant to areas like Natural Language Semantic Code Search. The event, which includes a discussion along with food and drinks, is open to the public, though registration is required due to limited space.

Craftwork Paris is a workshop event set for December 11, 2018, aimed at developers of all skill levels who want to learn how to utilize both GitHub and Datadog APIs to enhance their workflows by building GitHub Apps. Held at Datadog Paris HQ, the event will guide attendees through creating their first GitHub App using tools such as Probot and Glitch, with additional insights into leveraging the Datadog API for open source projects. The workshop promises a collaborative and informal atmosphere, where participants can work at their own pace with support from GitHub and Datadog staff, and leave with a functional GitHub App. The event includes food, refreshments, and stickers, with a requirement for attendees to have a GitHub account before participating.